Certain electronic systems can be exposed to transient electrical events that last a relatively short duration and have rapidly changing voltages and/or currents. Transient electrical events can include, for example, overvoltage, electrostatic discharge (ESD) or electromagnetic overstress (EOS) events arising from the abrupt release of charge from a power source, external object or person to an electronic system.
Transient electrical events can damage integrated circuits (ICs) inside an electronic system due to overvoltage conditions and/or high levels of power dissipation over relatively small areas of the ICs. This rapid and high dissipation of power can potentially lead to damage to core circuits, resulting in gate oxide punch-through, junction damage, metal damage, and/or surface charge accumulation, among other damaging phenomena. Moreover, transient electrical events can induce latch-up due to inadvertent creation of a low-impedance path, thereby disrupting the functioning of the IC and potentially causing permanent damage to the IC. Reliable high speed communication ICs often need to simultaneously have relatively low and relatively linear input loading capacitance between an interface terminal and a ground reference. Such characteristics, however, pose many challenges in broad band/high data rate communication system designs using CMOS technologies. Accordingly, there is a need for circuit interface device architectures for reliable design of broad band/high data rate communication systems using CMOS technologies.